The Beautiful Sonic Scatology of Gutalax
Provisions Before the Show
As I walked to the corner store near La Nau, in Barcelona's Poblenou neighborhood, these two dudes joined me.
The Band: Kojas: Guitar + Kebab: Bass + Freedom: Drums + Maty: Vox
Getting dirty is one thing. Getting dirtier together is where unity meets chaos.
There’s something crazy about watching the audience and the band become a single organism. Not simply reacting to the music, but participating in every part of the performance.
Before the show, I ran into a couple of dudes at a nearby supermarket. They looked like they'd escaped from a laboratory dealing with a particularly nasty biological accident.
It was a pretty good introduction. This was my first time surviving the madness of GUTALAX.
Watching the band reminded me of GWAR. Not necessarily because of the music, but because neither spectacle would be possible without its audience. Everybody arrives dressed for the occasion, ready for chaos, ready for madness, ready for fun.
The Czech band has been around for quite some time. They started their dirty business back in 2009, playing what they call Gore'n'Roll. A particularly filthy variation of goregrind, with a healthy obsession with everything that comes out of the human body. I guess that's why they named their band after a laxative. Fucking eww! But it fucking works!
Sonically, there's something that takes me back to early Carcass, when medical terminology and anatomical horrors were essential ingredients of the music. Who can forget lovely tunes like Maggot Colony and Genital Grinder? Gutalax takes that fine tradition to 11, with We Are What We Shit and Sex Drugs and Fecal Gore among the crowd favorites.
The vocals are particularly insane. They move from very deep guttural growls to something resembling a pig having a very unpleasant afternoon. Talk about vocal range! Maty, the singer, is your guy!
And somehow, it works.
The audience takes the band's nasty aesthetic and runs with it. Bad taste is the norm, and we all love it! Protective suits, industrial goggles, gas masks, corpse paint, and an impressive collection of bathroom-cleaning equipment, just to name a few of the insanely dirty props.
At some point, the mosh pit looked less like a grindcore show and more like a bathroom-cleaning convention that had gone terribly, terribly, terribly wrong.
And everybody was having the time of their lives.
Perhaps that's what makes Gutalax so entertaining. The music is freakin' brutal, and nobody seems particularly concerned about looking cool.
We live in an absurd world. Perhaps an absurd band is exactly what we all need.
Including the dudes shopping for groceries.
PHOTOS + STORY: A.F. CORTÉS